Two households, both alike in dignity...
or in refurbishment, at least. As the remodelled exterior of the RSC's
main house in Stratford becomes visible over the site hoardings, Tom
Morris at Bristol introduces work-in-progress modifications to the Old
Vic, which improve seating (at last!) and sightlines and reinstate the
old forestage. Both companies, too, unveiled new takes on Romeo and Juliet in the same week,
each mixing old and new in divers ways.

"Old" is the keynote of the Bristol production: Morris and Sean
O'Connor have adapted the play to set it among septuagenarians in a
care home. Montague and Capulet are the state-funded and private wings
respectively, Juliet (aged 79 rather than 13) is being forced into an
arranged marriage not by her parents but by her daughter and the doctor
in charge, and so on. Apart from a largely original prologue, virtually
all the text is Shakespeare's, although it has been occasionally
altered ("Death, not Romeo, take my maidenhead" would hardly be
plausible here) and trimmed, especially the broad comedy scenes and
everything that impedes momentum in the closing phase. This is the more
welcome since it must be said that the pacing of some earlier scenes,
well, lacks the frenzy of youthful passion.

At the RSC, director Rupert Goold, fêted (or, to some, notorious)
for his radical re-imaginings of the likes of The Tempest and Macbeth, stages a surprisingly
straight version of the play. The two titular characters are in modern
dress whilst everyone else is in period garb, presumably to point up
the tale's timelessness, but for the most part there is none of the
extreme Gooldification we have come to expect. For the most part.
Perversely, it is during the same final phase of Acts IV and V, just
when introducing novelty hinders rather than helps the gathering
dramatic impetus, that Goold flexes his muscles. The liturgical
background score is replaced by brooding post-rock, yet Romeo's servant
Balthasar sings many of his lines in a counter-tenor, and costuming
shifts unambiguously to the contemporary. Alas, one single stroke of
this process is so disastrously, unforgivably misjudged that it has
cost the production a full star in my review rating. At the very moment
of Juliet's suicide, a police siren whoops out. The tragic climax was
thus, on press night at least, greeted with sniggers. As part of a more
comprehensive, consciously provocative reinterpretation this might well
be justifiable; here, it is a breathtaking misfire.

Michael Byrne's Romeo in Bristol is surprised and delighted to be
experiencing real love again at such an age, and gives himself over to
it more compellingly than Sam Troughton's energetic swain at Stratford.
Neither Juliet comes entirely up to the mark of what is in some ways
the most far-reaching and dramatically demanding emotional journey made
by any female character in Shakespeare. Siân Phillips in Bristol
is of course a commanding presence, but never suggested to me either
the initial transports of rapture or the full heft of her transition
through to fatalistic knowledge; Phillips' inherent poise comes over
here as reserve. In Stratford Mariah Gale, often so good at playing
younger than her years, also misses out on the youthful joy, instead
focusing her early scenes on a more serious teenage intensity of
feeling. Exuberance centres in both productions on Mercutio: Dudley
Sutton in Bristol, complete with Zimmer frame, and bottle-blond Jonjo
O'Neill in Stratford, whose extravagantly obscene mimes and musical
outbursts earned him the only spontaneous round of applause at the
performance I saw. Both productions are solid, interesting, honourable
readings of the story... Or will be if Goold deals with that
catastrophic instant.